Authenticating Alterity: Stereotypical Signification in The Construction of The Black Other in Japan and The United States

As a source of identity and component of selfhood, concepts of “race” and their manipulation through racial representation exert a powerful influence on constructions of Self and Other, national identity, the nature of interpersonal experiences in cross-cultural contexts, and how those experiences are verbalized, interpreted and translated into various kinds of social performance. Increasingly, globalized discourses and iconographies of “blackness” have come to mediate a space through which Western notions of “race” are circulated, re-inscribed re-presented and reproduced abroad, and deployed locally by recipient cultures as they negotiate the boundaries of their own racio-ethnic identities.

This presentation examines constructions and performances of “blackness” through an interrogation of what is popularly referred to as “burakku karuchaa” in Japan and “black culture” in the United States and elsewhere and how such constructions and practices contribute to the reification of perdurable stereotypes about people of African descent and obscure and occlude sites of Asian-Black encounters by presenting “Asian” and “Black” as bounded, culturally and temperamentally opposed racial categories whose historical intersections, when not ignored or trivialized, invite disbelief, astonishment, and skepticism, and which (re)imagine them in ways that re-inscribe, confirm, and authenticate existing stereotypes and expectations about the Other.